Linda Gray Leithe
3325 Granville Drive / Raleigh NC 27609
Spouse: Mark Leithe
Children: Christopher / Andrew
Education: Michigan State University / Ohio State University for Medical School and Residency / Duke Medical Center for Neuroradiology Fellowship / Associate Professor of Neuroradiology for 35 years
Bio: How to encapsulate 60 years of living into a few paragraphs? Will give it a try and no one has to read all or any of it!
After High School I was on my way to U of M, all signed up ready to go into the math department! My folks and I went through the residential college where I was to be living ; there were mattresses pulled out into the hallway, marijuana wafting out from the rooms and I think the tipping point was the students running around naked, I was not going to be going here! My folks told me I would not be going to Uof M and instead would join Lisa Geovjian at MSU, I am grateful I did! If it were not for Lisa my life course would have likely been much different!
At MSU I considered Math, or Computer Science but could not see my future in either of those ( would likely rethink that now, hindsight is always the best); instead Lisa exposed me to biological sciences as she studied for Vet school. I was intrigued but thought taking care of people would be more interesting; they just put animals down when they are not doing well! Loved the sciences, even organic chemistry, probably because I had a cute TA. Decided to pursue medical school, much to the objection of my parents who had raised me as a Christian Scientist; I was generally a problem child!
During college Scott Warner and I got married, in retrospect, pushed into it by our parents. It was a "starter" marriage that in all likelihood, left on our own, we never would have pursued! We worked on it for nearly 8 years and then finally went our separate ways! Scott did get me down to Columbus, Ohio where he pursued a law degree and masters in finance and when he finished I started medical school at Ohio State, I was 1 of 18 women in a class of 220.
In medical school I was always the only woman on a rotation and everyone was younger than myself. On one of my last required clinical rotations, psychiatry, and met Mark Leithe, 5 years younger, he had an interest in going out; I reluctantly acquiesced with the stipulation that I only wanted something "cheap and superficial"!!!! I had no interest in a relationship of any kind with anyone!!!!! Six months later we took a camping trip to the northeast and 10 months later we were married. Nearly 40 years and 2 children later, I acquiesced on the cheap and superficial!
Mark and I both pursued internal medicine at Ohio State; I switched into radiology. We both finished our training at Duke, Mark in interventional Cardiology and myself in Neuroradiology. I loved Duke and wanted to stay there in neuroradiology; Mark worked for Duke, then Wake Med and then back at Duke as head of cardiology at Duke Raleigh Hospital and he will retire next year at 65. I was on staff at Duke and then in 1995 took over the residency training program of 48 residents and transformed that program as well as radiology training in general into an internship plus 3 years of general radiology and 2 years of subspecialty training ( 5 years of radiology training) . After 12 years of directing the residency training, I gave it up to become what I like to call a "primary care neuroradiologist". In 2002 CT fluoroscopy was developed by GE Medical and that allowed real time CT Interventions. This transformed the kind of interventions that could be done with greater accuracy and speed. We started doing CT spinal interventions for pain along the spinal axis, think epidurals or nerve root blocks for neck pain or low back pain, staving off surgery. There are now 9 radiologists who do over 5000 injections per year. CT pain injections are not commonly done and we have people flying down from Manhattan, from California and other parts of the country including Michigan for these types of procedures.
In 2006 I saw my 1st patient with a spontaneous spinal CSF leak; patients are often erroneously diagnosed with new daily persistent headache or chronic migraine and commonly have positional headaches, ie headaches that improve when the lay down and are worse when they are upright. They can have a constellation of other symptoms, nausea, vomiting, trouble swallowing, double vision, dizziness and dysequilibrium. Patients may go years before the diagnosis is made, I completely resolved the headaches in a woman who had them for 30 years and another who had headaches for 25 years after an epidural catheter was placed for the birth of her last child. We have figured out how to detect leaks and how to treat them; there are now 4 of us who treat patients with this problem, seeing between 4-500 patients per year. It is because of Mary Sestok that I decided to write my bio; she committed suicide due to her chronic headaches and I will always wonder if I could have helped her?? My legacy for my career will be the establishment of a center for the treatment of pain and CSF leaks using minimally CT fluoroscopic guidance. I will be eternally grateful to the 3 other physicians at Duke who bought into taking care of and treating patients with this problem. I now give lectures to neurologists, headache specialists, neurosurgeons and other neuroradiologists to raise awareness of the imaging findings and clinical presentation of cerebrospinal pressure problems as a cause of headaches.
Onto my children: Christopher lives in Raleigh and is involved in startups currently working for a startup out of San Francisco, Food Smart; thankfully he is able to work from Raleigh doing all meetings and work virtually! Andrew lives in Westfield, NJ and bought his falther-in-laws wealth management business and is married to Amanda who works for Legg Mason in Manhattan as an analyst; they have our 2 grandchildren Annabelle nearly 3 and Archer 3 months. We don't see them enough but will when we are both retired!
My sister lives in northern Michigan on Burt lake with her husband Tom Prout so I keep in touch with Michigan through she and Barb and Tom Prew and obviously through Woody's emails, so grateful for those!
Our extracurricular activities include going to Blowing Rock and hiking the Blue Ridge Mountains, cooking, wine drinking, seeing shows and traveling.
Our future in retirement? Classes at Duke in History and Art History? Music, longer trips, seeing friends and more time in NJ to see the grandkids! We will let that next phase unfold as it will!
Miss all of you! Look forward to reconnecting in the future.